Tag: Herman Cain

Get out the popcorn! Thanks to Newt Gingrich’s surprising win in the South Carolina Republican primary yesterday, it looks like those of us who enjoy political theater have many more weeks or months of it to revel in. One thing is clear: Republican primary voters are having a hard time choosing from their crop of candidates. You get the feeling Bob Forehead would win if he were on the ballot. (Mitt Romney does remind me a lot of Bob Forehead. It must be coincidence.)

At least it is now down to four: the Mormon, the serial adulterer, the zealot and the crackpot. A number of other crackpots have already exited stage right, including Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain and Rick Perry. Jon Huntsman posed as the moderate candidate in the race, although his tax policies were anything but moderate. Anyhow, they are gone and I for one will miss Bachmann, Cain and Perry for their circus sideshow qualities. It’s hard to lampoon candidates who are already crazy parodies of candidates but simply do not know it.

We are learning some things as these primaries drag on. First, it’s a bad idea to entrust vote counting to the Iowa Republican Party. They must not have excelled in math in school, and they lost votes altogether for some precincts. Mitt Romney won Iowa by eight votes, then some weeks later he lost it, but no one can really say for sure because they also lost precinct votes. Doing all that vote counting at an undisclosed location is hardly a way to instill confidence in the process either. Call it a tie, maybe, between the Mormon and the zealot.

Second, Republicans simply refuse to nominate a moderate. In today’s Republican Party, Ronald Reagan would be castigated as a flaming liberal. Even Jon Huntsman tilted much further to the right than Ronald Reagan ever did. Being angry is considered an asset; being statesman-like means you are a pussy. At least anecdotally, South Carolina Republicans picked serial philanderer Newt Gingrich not because of his family values, but because he was the best of the four of them at articulating their rage. It takes balls to tell an African American to their face their problem is they don’t work hard enough.

Third, for a party supposedly centered on liberty and freedom, they sure don’t want to hand much of it out. In fact, they want to take away a lot of freedoms. One freedom they can all agree on: the right to own lots and lots of increasingly lethal weapons, with no pesky laws to get in the way of you and your paranoia. But on many other freedoms, they would gladly rescind them. The freedom to have an abortion? Perish the thought. The freedom to marry someone you love who happens to be of the same sex? It’s immoral and hence must be outlawed. The freedom of a 17-year old girl to buy a Plan B “after the fact” contraceptive over the counter, which is clinically proven both safe and effective? Not for you, you little harlot. The freedom to vote without having an officially blessed form of state-issued identification? Sorry, no, at least in many of these Republican states which recently passed onerous voter ID laws.

Freedom, as Republicans like to tell us, is not free, which is another way of saying freedom has to be purchased, i.e. it’s sort of like buying emancipation. If you cannot afford to buy it, well that’s just tough. If you want the freedom to vote, then trek down to your local DMV and get an official ID and pay for it with your own money, and do it on your own time. (This is not, they tell us, a poll tax. Go figure.) You have the freedom to eat as much food as you can afford to buy, and if you cannot afford any you are free to starve. The same goes with your health, your employment and your choice of abode. You have the freedom to call a cardboard box home rather than pay rent. Freedom means never getting a handout. Freedom essentially means that those with the means get to have a whole lot more freedom than you do. Also it is an essential part of the government’s mission to remove any possibility that society might help the poor climb the social ladder. As Herman Cain informed us, if you are poor it’s your own damn fault. You just aren’t trying hard enough.

You can see why it would be confusing to Republican primary voters to choose a nominee, although right now anger seems to be a vote getter. In conservative family-values South Carolina of all places you would think that a serial philanderer would have a hard time getting votes. But voters seem more interested in a candidate who can express their anger than one who is consistent with family values. So they cheered Gingrich on in a recent debate when moderator John King asked Gingrich to comment on his ex-wife Marianne’s allegation that he petitioned her for an open marriage. Gingrich turned the inevitable question into a personal attack and the audience roared approval. Perhaps all this family value talk is just talk, as red states have higher divorce rates than blue states anyhow.

Then there is the question: can a true Christian pull the lever for a Mormon? New Hampshire Republicans had no problem, but they are suspiciously secular up there. In God-fearing South Carolina, if your candidate is not a real Christian, he doesn’t share your values, so you cannot vote for him. Instead, pick Gingrich, the faux-Christian instead. You would think his Catholicism would be a stroke against him in a deeply Protestant state, but it’s Christian enough apparently. Besides, Gingrich is about as Christian in temperament as Attila the Hun was a humanitarian, which in fact resembles most so-called Christians that I know.

Which leaves the zealot and the crackpot. The zealot, a.k.a. as Rick Santorum, is so incredibly monogamous he won’t even sit on a sofa with another woman not his wife. He was a huge failure as a U.S. senator but apparently did not get the message, even when he lost his reelection bid by seventeen points. Santorum says he is the only true conservative in the race. Maybe so, but he is conservative in a nasty Fred Rogers sort of way, although he looks great in a sweater vest. This is a guy who is so far to the right that even obvious right-wingers avoid him. His proposal to limit the National Weather Service to issuing severe long-range weather forecasts only was so bizarre and unworldly that not a single other senator signed on as a cosponsor. Santorum is a true conservative indeed. Even I have to give him credit for this.

Then there is the crackpot. Doubtless I risk the ire of legions of Ron Paul fans out there by calling him a crackpot, but he is one. Anyone who refuses to ever make an exception to move outside his or her ideology is a crackpot. One way I can tell a true crackpot is I tend to agree with some of their positions. I agree with Paul that we should be out of Afghanistan, for example. It’s all that other weird stuff he believes in where it’s hard to stifle derisive laughter. He wants to eliminate much of the government including essential agencies like the EPA, kill the Federal Reserve Board, go on the gold standard, and withdraw from the UN and WTO. And for a pro-freedom kind of guy, freedom apparently doesn’t extend to a woman’s right to have an abortion, or the right to have consensual sodomy, since granted to us by a conservative Supreme Court. Calling Ron Paul a crackpot is actually to diminish him with faint praise. Nonetheless, a significant portion of the Republican electorate apparently agrees with this guy. Fortunately, his anti-foreign-policy stand makes it impossible for him to win the nomination. His candidacy does beg the question: who is freakier: the fetishly clean Rick Santorum or the obsessively and ideologically weird Ron Paul? This is the kind of question I could debate with friends all night, and we could never agree on, but it would still be a fun debate.

I plan to stock up on popcorn and hope this nominating process goes all the way to a brokered convention.

Of course, I cannot say for certain that Cain is lying about denying incidents of alleged sexual harassment and, more recently, denying an alleged 13-year on-again, off-again affair with an Atlanta-based divorcee. On the latter allegation, Cain at least admits a friendship with the alleged other woman, Ginger White. He admits giving her money from time to time. From the voluminous cell phone logs provided by Ms. White, it would be hard to deny they traded a lot of text messages, including one at 4:30 in the morning.

That’s quite a “friendship” you have there, Herman. Can I get in on this act? I suspect though I would not qualify for your offer because I am inconveniently a male and thus not quite the sort of “friend” you are looking for. I’d be glad to take your free money for being “friends”, as long as you don’t expect me to answer text messages at 4:30 a.m. Ideally, we’d be just Facebook friends.

My gut though tells me that Cain is just another in a long line of serial philanderers and sexual harassers so full of themselves they believe they are God’s gift to humanity, and in this case, the United States too. If I were in the top one percent like he is, maybe my ego would bloat up too, like a giant Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in a Thanksgiving Day parade. Then maybe I could lie convincingly like Herman Cain. To lie like he does, you first have to be shameless. He seems to have all the qualifications there. This is, after all, a guy who feels free to berate the 99% for being failures because they are not among the 1%. It is much easier to imagine this than all these women being shameless too in order to get a day in the national news. If so, they probably had a terrific mentor. Unfortunately for Cain, there are all sorts of corroborating evidence: phone logs, overly personal handwritten notes in books that he has signed and memories of intimates of the accusers when these incidents happened. So as much as I might want to give Cain benefit of the doubt, the evidence suggests, if a fire never happened, something sure is smoldering.

I imagine learning to lie convincingly takes practice. It requires acting, although in Cain’s case he may have done it for so long that it has become like a second skin. One of the reasons I am so bad at lying is because I have so rarely attempted it. There are many reasons for this, but most likely it is because in my formative years I learned that lying was a sin. I learned this not just on my pappy’s knees, but also from various Sisters of Charity with long yardsticks and a flair for inflicting corporal punishment. So whenever I have lied I felt guilt. But more often I felt shame, which was painfully easily read on my face.

African Americans like Cain may have an advantage here: their darker faces make it easier to hide a flushed face. Or perhaps he never learned to feel ashamed about lying. Regardless, the art of lying convincingly requires no fear. Raise that chin. Look the camera directly in the eye. Do not hyper-blink. Be the person you want to project. This probably becomes easier as you rise in the corporate world. People learn to fear you, or at least act in a submissive fashion. The world should move around you, rather than the other way around. This approach has the “virtue” of providing an element of doubt. If you can charge fearlessly ahead in spite of these allegations like Cain, it is easier to give the benefit of the doubt to the candidate, particularly if you are inclined to vote for him anyhow.

I do wonder what would happen if there were incontrovertible proof. If Cain and White did have sex, there may be DNA evidence lying around. This certainly was bad news for Bill Clinton but at least he was already president at the time. Cain might regret his absolute denials. Meanwhile the Cain campaign is hedging, saying it is “reassessing” his candidacy. An untimely withdrawal from the race may be as close as we get of an admission of guilt.

I would not be surprised, as in the case of Jenny Sanford, if some weeks after Cain’s withdrawal from the race we learn that his wife Gloria has filed for divorce. Then, instead of people remembering Cain for his 9-9-9 plan, his fortunes reversed, we may remember 666 instead: the Number of the Beast.

Protestors on Wall Street and elsewhere are occupying spots in major cities, trying to make the top one percent acknowledge the ninety nine percent. Many are without jobs. Those with jobs may have taken pay cuts, or were forced to go part time, or were required to contribute more toward health care or retirement. Many of those protestors also carry the burden of underwater mortgages. Others are saddled with burdensome student debt.

They are the unemployed, the underemployed, the over leveraged, the disenfranchised and the generally pissed off. If you are one of them, at a certain point you might as well pitch a tent in Zucotti Park. The weather may be too hot or too cold. You may have to wait in a line at McDonalds at 3 AM to use a toilet. You may suffer from insomnia from the din of a city that never sleeps and smell like a bus depot. But at least you are in the presence of fellow compatriots. You have known relentless misery, you are knowing more misery but at least you can talk with someone who really understands. And once a day or so you can shout out your lungs at the largely tone-deaf moneyed class who might, if the weather is nice, toast you with champagne from the balcony of the New York Stock Exchange.

Mortgage rates are at record lows, but little good this does someone who is underwater on their mortgage. Because they had the flawed judgment to misjudge the future, they are no longer credit worthy, so certainly no respectable lender is going to let them renegotiate their mortgage. The Sword of Damocles shall always be pressed against their chests. No, only good people, really special people, i.e. those with actual equity in their house and good jobs get to refinance their mortgages at crazy low interest rates. In that sense, maybe I am one of the one percent.

No, not really. Our income is not that lofty. We’d need $343,927 in adjusted gross income to fall into that bracket. We’re not quite in the top five percent either. We’d need $154,653 in AGI to qualify. We come close though, so we are definitely in the top ten percent, which is good enough for many of us with mortgages to get one of those sweet refinance deals. Unlike those with underwater mortgages, our property had about twenty years to mostly appreciate, so that when prices finally fell we still had plenty of equity. Plus, over nearly two decades we have chipped away at our house’s principle. The current balance on our mortgage is $64,211.24. We paid $191,000 for the house in 1993 and took a mortgage for $171,900 of the amount. It was not until two years ago that we managed to get the balance below $100,000.

Despite our current 6.875% interest rate, our credit union is still happy to refinance the balance of our mortgage, if we don’t mind giving them $2581 in various fees for the privilege. In exchange they will pay off our 30-year mortgage and give us a new 10-year mortgage at 2.875%. We should save $372 a month in interest, once we pay off the fees, which will take about seven months.

As for those of you with underwater mortgages, sorry, you are largely out of luck. I’d like to say we possessed some sort of genius, buying low in good neighborhoods but the truth was we were just lucky. My wife and I could easily have been underwater on our mortgage too. By chance and perhaps date of birth we rolled double sixes.

Please don’t be angry with us. Yet there must be some sort of element of unfairness here. Someone must be getting shafted when we start accumulating $372 more a month. Rest assured that just like the brokers on Wall Street this extra income will be unearned. I did not have to take a part time job at a Wal-Mart to bring home this extra bacon. I just had to fill out some papers, tidy up the house for the real estate appraiser and endure yet another loan closing ceremony. This will be our fourth, since we first owned a townhouse and already refinanced once. The only deficiency to our refinanced loan is that I will have less mortgage interest to write off on my taxes. Still, I would rather pay more taxes than pay a lender extra interest. Perhaps some of it will trickle down to some of you. I would not hold your breath. I don’t plan to hire a gardener, and I already got a service that mows the grass.

Granted, owning a house comes with all sorts of other expenses not factored into the principle, interest and escrow. The entire outside of our house with the exception of three doors has been replaced. Every appliance has been replaced, sometimes more than once. Still, I can remember the days when I was living on a marginal income and rented. Once a year like clockwork you could count on the rent being raised, generally well above the cost of living. Soon we will be paying less per month in principle and interest than we paid thirty years ago per month when we lived in an apartment. It makes no sense. Meanwhile, as the downsized give up houses and end up back in apartments, extra demand is making rents go up. This crazy disparity makes no sense to me. It probably does to a Republican like Herman Cain. After all, they are loooosers.

The day is not that far off (I am hoping less than five years) when we will make that final mortgage payment. Then there will be no more mortgage payments ever. We will own the house, not to mention our cars, free and clear. Moreover, for the first time since I was age twenty or so I will be able to honestly say that I won’t owe anyone a dime. I can lay down the heavy burden of debt from my shoulders at last. I plan a party on that day, and drinking a lot of expensive champagne. I might even get drunk.

Being free of debt won’t mean our lives will be free, of course. I don’t know what I will do with all that extra money every month. Perhaps with my decent pension and retirement saving I will truly retire and never work another day in my life. Perhaps it will get eaten up in ever more egregious health care premiums or long-term care insurance. For a while though I hope I can at least revel in being free from the burden of debt.

Herman Cain is Tea Party America’s favorite presidential candidate of the moment. Recent polls show him leading among Republican voters. While recent history suggests that Cain fascination will be brief (Michele who? Rick who?), you can understand why conservatives would be gaga over him. Cain, when speaking about Occupy Wall Street protesters, had this retort:

Don’t blame Wall Street, don’t blame the big banks, if you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself! […] It is not someone’s fault if they succeeded; it is someone’s fault if they failed.

Attention 99% America: this may not be obvious to you but anyone can succeed in America. The only reason we are all not millionaires is because only one percent found the moxie to become a success. The ability to achieve success includes everyone: including the crippled, the disease ridden, the mentally retarded and the homeless. You can all become independently rich if you try hard enough. And if you don’t, you are a failure. A complete looooser.

If you are still not getting it, consider the curve of standard deviation below. It seems in nature most of us fit somewhere in the middle of the curve, but some of us are must inevitably be on the low or the high end. There are very few in the top one percent of the curve. Herman Cain is one of them. You and me, we’re in the 99% and the reason that I infer this is true, channeling Herman Cain, is because we chose to go fat and be lazy:

If you are not in the top 1%, you are a looooser

In the world of Herman Cain and Tea Party America, here is where we could all be if we tried hard enough:

The possible American world according to Herman Cain

That’s right. We all can all be millionaires, just suck in it, suck it up, be clever, put your nose to the grindstone and inevitably you too, like Herman Cain, can rise from humble circumstances to become a millionaire. It’s that simple. When you have the right mental attitude, just like God, you can move mountains. End of story.

But some people just aren’t getting it. They apparently include Matt, a guy I hired to do some handyman work for me. The guy I tried to hire was too busy, so he referred me to Matt. Matt is a guy who lives somewhere off I-66 in Virginia’s Piedmont. Five days a week he works a full time job somewhere that obviously does not come close to covering his modest lifestyle. When not working, he is taking care of his four kids so his wife can work at her odd part time jobs. On some Friday and Saturday nights, if he is lucky, he gets gigs playing the guitar at local pubs, which contributes some spare change to household expenses, and is his one passion in life. On Thursdays and Saturdays he runs his other business: handyman for hire. He does about a third of the work himself, but he also hires other good ol’ white boys like him to put in a few hours here and there to handle customers like me who are not Tool Time Tims. All of them so far that I’ve met smoke and all appear to live hand to mouth. They are Joe Bageant’s poor working class. This week some of them made some spare change because Matt subcontracted some of my work to them.

The weather has not been a construction worker’s friend this week. We had torrential rain for a good part of yesterday. The guys tried to tack down the new screening on our deck between downpours; otherwise they were in our garage trying to put up a new garage ceiling. For some reason the morons who built our house back in the 1980s attached drywall to the ceiling of our garage. About a quarter of it fell out while I was cleaning it a few weeks back, fortunately not while I was directly under it. I’m having them replace it with sturdier particleboard, and directed that they actually use screws to attach the boards into the joists instead of the drywall nails used when the house was constructed. Anyhow, progress has been slow.

Matt apparently is not working hard enough to be a success. He was managing multiple other projects with other good ol’ boys, which meant frequent trips to Manassas and other places to make things right. He’s pissed that he’s behind on our job, and is apologetic. Fortunately I am in no hurry.

Matt is basically doing everything possible to make money in this economy with his natural talents, but even with three jobs and essentially working twelve or more hours a day seven days a week, it’s still not enough. What’s the problem here?

If you were thinking, “Well, the economy is not doing too great, and a handyman’s wages are pretty modest, and gosh, it takes a lot to feed a family of six” you are one of the 99% and hence a looooser. If you are the surreally out of touch Herman Cain, the solution is obvious: Matt is a failure. Moreover, he is simply not trying hard enough. Maybe if in addition to working seven days a week he gave up the guitar gigs and worked instead of sleep, he could finally achieve success. He basically should run himself into the ground even more than he is doing now, which is leaving him obese, tobacco addicted and with circles under his eyes.

I bet you can guess where I stand on this. It’s pretty simple. Herman Cain, you may be a success, but in many ways you are also a moron who cannot see one centimeter past the bridge of your nose. Only a moron or a conservative would actually believe this crap that you spewed out. And yet it seems part of our American character to believe your crap. The fault is never in our stars, or in the broader economy, or in life’s circumstances, or our genetics, or our abusive parents, or our substandard schools but only in ourselves. Just like original sin that the Catholics believe in, in your mind the original sin is the inability of everyone to replicate what you achieved. The rest of us are failures, basically dog poop.

Mr. Cain, please print this out and stick it up some orifice in your body where the sun don’t shine. Consider it a little thank you from one of the 99%. And Matt, I feel nothing but compassion for you and the good ol’ boys who work for you, even if I can’t get too close to you because I am a nonsmoker. You are doing extraordinary things and while it is still clearly not enough, you have my respect and heartfelt sympathy. You also have my sincere hope that the economy improves quickly so you don’t need to be someone’s handyman anymore and get the chance to breathe again. And I hope you get more gigs strumming out those songs that you love.